The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “Why—er—yes,” he hesitated. “I think so.”

  “Where? At Vera’s?” she asked, adopting a tone not of curiosity but of chiding him for seeing Stella instead of herself.

  The moment of hesitation, before he said that he didn’t know, told her the truth. It was as good as a plain, “Yes.”

  For a few moments they chatted. As she hung up the receiver after his deferential goodbye, Constance knew that she had gained a new angle from which to observe Warrington’s character. He was intensely human and he was “in wrong.” Here was a mess, all around.

  The day wore on, yet brought no indecision as to what she would do, though it brought no solution as to how to do it. The inaction was worse than anything else. The last quotations had come in over the ticker, showing the Syndicate stocks still unchanged. She left her brokers and sat for a few moments in the rotunda of the hotel, considering. She could stand it no longer. Whatever happened, she would run around to Charmant’s. Some excuse would occur when she got there.

  As Constance alighted from the private elevator, a delicate scent as of attar of roses smote lightly on her, and there was, if anything, a greater air of exotic warmth about the place. Everything, from the electric bulbs buried deep in the clusters of amber artificial flowers to the bright green leaves on the dainty trellises, the little square-paned windows and white furniture, bespoke luxury. There was an inviting “tone” to it all.

  “I’m glad I’ve found you,” began Constance to Stella, as though nothing had happened. “There is something I’d like to say to you besides thanking you most kindly for the good time last—”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” interrupted Madame Charmant in a business like tone. “I am sure that Miss Larue invited you last night because she thought you were lonely. She and Mr. Warrington, you know, are old friends.”

  Charmant emphasized the remark to mean, “You trespassed on forbidden ground, if you thought you could get him away.”

  Constance seemed not to notice the implication.

  “There is something I’d like to say,” she repeated gently.

  She picked up a little inking pad which lay on a mahogany secretary which Vera used as an office desk.

  “If you will be so kind, Stella, as to place your fingers flat on this pad-never mind about the ink; call Floretta; she will wipe them off afterwards-and then on this piece of paper, I won’t bother you further.”

  Almost before she knew it, the little actress had placed her dainty white hand on the pad and then on the paper.

  Constance did the same, to illustrate, then called Floretta. “If Vera will do as I have done,” she said, offering her the pad, and taking her hand. Charmant complied, and when Floretta arrived her impressions were added to the others.

  “There’s a man wishes to see you, outside, Madame,” said Floretta, wiping off the soiled finger tips.

  “Tell him to wait—in the little room.”

  Floretta opened the door to go out and through it Constance caught sight of a familiar face.

  A moment later the man was in the room with them. It was Drummond, the same sneer, the same assurance in his manner.

  “So,” he snarled at Constance. “You here?”

  “I seem to be here,” she answered calmly. “Why?”

  “Never mind why,” he blustered. “I knew you saw me the other night. I heard you tell ’em to hit it up so as to shake me. But I found out all right.”

  “Found out what?” asked Constance coldly.

  “Say, that’s about your style, isn’t it? You always get in when it comes to trimming the good spenders, don’t you?”

  “Mr. Drummond,” she replied, “I don’t care to talk to you.”

  “You don’t, hey? Well, perhaps, when the time comes you’ll have to talk. How about that?”

  She was thinking rapidly. Was Mrs. Warrington preparing to strike a blow that would be the last impulse necessary to send the plunger down for the last time? She decided to take a chance, to temporize until some one else made a move.

  “I’d thank you to place your fingers on this pad,” said Constance quietly. “I’m making a collection of these things.”

  “You are, are you?”

  “Yes,” she cut short. “And if my collection isn’t large enough I shall call up Mrs. Warrington and ask her to come over, too,” she added significantly.

  Floretta entered again. “Please wipe the ink off Mr. Drummond’s fingers,” ordered Constance quietly, still holding out the pad.

  “Confound your impudence,” he ground out, seizing the pad. “There! What do you mean by Mrs. Warrington? What has she to do with this? Have a care, Mrs. Dunlap—you’re on the wrong track here, and going the wrong way.”

  “Mr. Warrington is—” began Floretta.

  “Show him in—quick,” demanded Constance, determined to bring the affair to a show-down on the spot.

  As the door swung open, Warrington looked at the group in unfeigned surprise.

  “Mr. Warrington,” greeted Constance without giving any of the others a chance, “this morning, I heard a little conversation up here. Floretta, will you go into the little room, and on the top shelf you will find a bottle. Bring it here carefully. I have a sheet of paper, also, which I am going to show you. I had already seen the little woman, Mr. Warrington, whom you have treated so unjustly. She was here trying vainly to win you back by those arts which she thinks must appeal to you.”

  Floretta returned with the bottle and placed it on the secretary beside Constance.

  “Some one took some tablets from this bottle and gave them to some one else who wrote on this paper,” she resumed, bending first over the paper she had torn from the pad. “Ah, a loop with twelve ridges, another loop, a whorl, a whorl, a loop. The marks on this paper correspond precisely with those made here just now by—Vera Charmant herself!”

  “You get out of here—quick,” snarled Drummond, placing himself between the now furious Vera and Constance.

  “One minute,” replied Constance calmly. “I am sure Mr. Warrington is a gentleman, if you are not. Perhaps I have no finger prints to correspond with those on the bottle. If not, I am sure that we can send for some one whose prints will do so.”

  She was studying the bottle.

  “The other, however,” she said slowly to conceal her own surprise, “was a person who has been set to trail you and Stella, Mr. Warrington, a detective named Drummond!”

  Suddenly the truth flashed over her. Drummond was not employed by Mrs. Warrington at all. Then by whom? By the directors. And the rest of these people? Grafters who were using Stella to bait the hook. Braden had gone over to them, had aided in plunging Warrington into the wild life until he could no longer play the business game as before. Charmant was his confederate, Drummond his witness.

  “Stella,” said Constance, turning suddenly to the little actress, “Stella, they are using you, ‘Diamond Jack’ and Vera, using you to lead him on, playing the game of the minority of the directors of the Syndicate to get him out. There is to be a meeting of the directors to-night at the Prince Henry. He was to be in no condition to go. Are you willing to be mixed up in such a scandal?”

  Stella Larue was crying into a lace handkerchief. “You—you are all—against me,” she sobbed. “What have I done?”

  “Nothing,” soothed Constance, patting her shoulder. “As for Charmant and Drummond, they are tied by these proofs,” she added, tapping the papers with the prints, then picking them up and handing them to Warrington. “I think if the story were told to the directors at the Prince Henry to-night with reporters waiting downstairs in the lobby, it might produce a quieting effect.”

  Warrington was speechless. He saw them all against him, Vera, Braden, Stella, Drummond.

  “More than that,” added Cons
tance, “nothing that you can ever do can equal the patience, the faith of the little woman I saw here to-day, slaving, yes, slaving for beauty. Here in my hand, in these scraps of paper, I hold your old life,—not part of it, but all of it,” she emphasized. “You have your chance. Will you take it?”

  He looked up quickly at Stella Larue. She had risen impulsively and flung her arms about Constance.

  “Yes,” he muttered huskily, taking the papers, “all of it.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE ABDUCTORS

  “Take care of me—please—please!”

  A slip of a girl, smartly attired in a fur-trimmed dress and a chic little feather-tipped hat, hurried up to Constance Dunlap late one afternoon as she turned the corner below her apartment.

  “It isn’t faintness or illness exactly—but—it’s all so hazy,” stammered the girl breathlessly. “And I’ve forgotten who I am. I’ve forgotten where I live—and a man has been following me—oh, ever so long.”

  The weariness in the tone of the last words caused Constance to look more closely at the girl. Plainly she was on the verge of hysterics. Tears were streaming down her pale cheeks and there were dark rings under her eyes, suggestive of a haunting fear of something from which she fled.

  Constance was astounded for the moment. Was the girl crazy? She had heard of cases like this, but to meet one so unexpectedly was surely disconcerting.

  “Who has been following you!” asked Constance gently, looking hastily over her shoulder and seeing no one.

  “A man,” exclaimed the girl, “but I think he has gone now.”

  “Can’t you think of your name!” urged Constance. “Try.”

  “No,” cried the girl, “no, I can’t, I can’t.”

  “Or your address?” repeated Constance. “Try—try hard!”

  The girl looked vacantly about.

  “No,” she sobbed, “it’s all gone—all.”

  Puzzled, Constance took her arm and slowly walked her up the street toward her own apartment in the hope that she might catch sight of some familiar face or be able to pull herself together.

  But it was of no use.

  They passed a policeman who eyed them sharply. The mere sight of the blue-coated officer sent a shudder through the already trembling girl on her arm.

  “Don’t, don’t let them take me to a hospital—don’t,” pleaded the girl in a hoarse whisper when they had passed the officer.

  “I won’t,” reassured Constance. “Was that the man who was following you?”

  “No—oh, no,” sobbed the girl nervously looking back.

  “Who was he, then?” asked Constance eagerly.

  The girl did not answer, but continued to look back wildly from time to time, although there was no doubt that, if he existed at all, the man had disappeared.

  Suddenly Constance realized that she had on her hands a case of aphasia, perhaps real, perhaps induced by a drug.

  At any rate, the fear of being sent away to an institution was so strong in the poor creature that Constance felt intuitively how disastrous to her might be the result of disregarding the obsession.

  She was in a quandary. What should she do with the girl? To leave her on the street was out of the question. She was now more helpless than ever.

  They had reached the door of the apartment. Gently she led the trembling girl into her own home.

  But now the question of what to do arose with redoubled force. She hesitated to call a physician, at least yet, because his first advice would probably be to send the poor little stranger to the psychopathic ward of some hospital.

  Constance’s eye happened to rest on the dictionary in her bookcase. Perhaps she might recall the girl’s name to her, if she were not shamming, by reading over the list of women’s names in the back of the book.

  It meant many minutes, perhaps hours. But then Constance reflected on what might have happened to the girl if she had chanced to appeal to some one who had not felt a true interest in her. It was worth trying. She would do it.

  Starting with “A,” she read slowly.

  “Is your name Abigail?”

  Down through Barbara, Camilla, Deborah, Edith, Faith, she read.

  “Flora?” she asked.

  The girl seemed to apprehend something, appear less blank.

  “Florence?” persisted Constance.

  “Oh, yes,” she cried, “that’s it—that’s my name.”

  But as for the last name and the address she was just as hazy as ever. Still, there was now something different about her.

  “Florence—Florence what?” reiterated Constance patiently.

  There was no answer. But with the continued repetition it seemed as if some depth in her nature had been stirred. Constance could not help feeling that the girl had really found herself.

  She had risen and was facing Constance, both hands pressed to her throbbing temples as if to keep her head from bursting. Constance had assisted her off with her coat and hat, and now the sartorial wreck of her masses of blonde hair was apparent.

  “I suppose,” she cried incoherently, “I’m just one more of the thousands of girls who drop out of sight every year.”

  Constance listened in amazement. As the spell of her influence seemed to calm the overwrought mind of the girl there succeeded a hardness in her tone that was wholly out of keeping with her youth. There was something that breathed of a past where there should have been nothing but the thought of a future.

  “Tell me why,” soothed Constance with an air that invited confidence.

  The girl looked up and again passed her hand over her white forehead with its mass of tangled fallen hair. Somehow Constance felt a tingling sensation of sympathy in her heart. Impulsively she put out her hand and took the cold moist hand of the girl.

  “Because,” she hesitated, struggling now with re-flooding consciousness, “because—I don’t know. I thought, perhaps—” she added, dropping her eyes, “you could—help me.”

  She was speaking rapidly enough now, “I think they have employed detectives to trace me. One of them is almost up with me. I’m afraid I can’t slip out of the net again. And—I—I won’t go back to them. I can’t. I won’t.”

  “Go back to whom?” queried her friend. “Detectives employed by whom?”

  “My folks,” she answered quickly.

  Constance was surprised. Least of all had she expected that.

  “Why won’t you go home?” she prompted as the girl seemed about to lapse into a sort of stolid reticence.

  “Home?” she repeated bitterly. “Home? No one would believe my story. I couldn’t go home, now. They have made it impossible for me to go home. I mean, every newspaper has published my picture. There were headlines for days, and only by chance I was not recognized.”

  She was sobbing now convulsively. “If they had only let me alone! I might have gone back, then. But now—after the newspapers and the search—never! And yet I am going to have revenge some day. When he least expects it I am going to tell the truth and—”

  She stopped.

  “And what?” asked Constance.

  “Tell the truth—and then do a cowardly thing. I would—”

  “You would not!” blazed Constance.

  There was no mistaking the meaning.

  “Leave it to me. Trust me. I will help you.”

  She pulled the girl down on the divan beside her.

  “Why talk of suicide?” mused Constance. “You can plead this aphasia I have just seen. I know lots of newspaper women. We could carry it through so that even the doctors would help us. Remember, aphasia will do for a girl nowadays what nothing else can do.”

  “Aphasia!” Florence repeated harshly. “Call it what you like—weakness—anything. I—I loved that ma
n—not the one who followed me—another. I believed him. But he left me—left me in a place—across in Brooklyn. They said I was a fool, that some other fellow, perhaps better, with more money, would take care of me. But I left. I got a place in a factory. Then some one in the factory became suspicious. I had saved a little. It took me to Boston.

  “Again some one grew suspicious. I came back here, here—the only place to hide. I got another position as waitress in the Betsy Ross Tea Room. There I was able to stay until yesterday. But then a man came in. He had been there before. He seemed too interested in me, not in a way that others have been, but in me—my name. Some how I suspected. I put on my hat and coat. I fled. I think he followed me. All night I have walked the streets and ridden in cars to get away from him. At last—I appealed to you.”

  The girl had sunk back into the soft pillows of the couch beside her new friend and hid her face. Softly Constance patted and smoothed the wealth of golden hair.

  “You—you poor little girl,” she sympathized.

  Then a film came over her own eyes.

  “New York took me at a critical time in my own life,” she said more to herself than to the girl. “She sheltered me, gave me a new start. What she did for me she will do for any other person who really wishes to make a fresh start in life. I made few acquaintances, no friends. Fortunately, the average New Yorker asks only that his neighbor leave him alone. No hermit could find better and more complete solitude than in the heart of this great city.”

  Constance looked pityingly at the girl before her.

  “Why can’t you tell them,” she suggested, “that you wanted to be independent, that you went away to make your own living?”

  “But—they—my father—is well off. And they have this detective who follows me. He will find me some day—for the reward—and will tell the truth.”

  “The reward?”

  “Yes—a thousand dollars. Don’t you remember reading—”

  The girl stopped short as if to check herself.